battle. I have managed to do this with Hirigana to a point that I am not daunted by it. (The very existence of Hirigana reassures me that someone down through the Japanese ages shared the view that 'Man cannot read by Kanji alone'.) Learn the characters, sound it out and familiarize yourself with the idiosyncrasies such as 'chi-sai tsu' and 'yo'. (A similar principal to 'ph' making an 'f" sound) Same arrangement as our alphabet. Know the foundation and no surprises can be sprung. (Though in Japan this must be done twice over to accommodate the syllabary created for the sole purpose of bastardizing the English language, Katakana.)

This structure, on which I didn't realize I so heavily relied, is not present in Kanji. Sure there is an organization to Kanji but this involves memorizing pictograms and radicals for trees, rivers and mountains. As soon as one foolishly believes that they have that mastered, one then realizes that there are numerous different readings not to mention the stroke order. This is before the discovery that one can put two to three Kanji together to make one and then where the hell are we?

Truth be told I am fascinated by Kanji. I love to be in awe of it. Nothing excites me more than pages and pages of tightly packed Kanji. When faced with it I feel so insignificant and humbled, like being in an airplane and looking down on the clouds. It causes me to feel this way simply because I know that I will never understand it and I want to so badly. I feel the need to capture it so there is a small chance that I will remember it. This fixation to freeze-frame every Kanji has turned me into a veritable magpie which causes my previously minimalist design style and indeed approach to living, to bite the dust. I have managed to accumulate the most inordinate amount of rubbish as I can't seem to throw away anything in this country. I keep bags, pizza advertisements, payment reminders, receipts and all the handouts given to me in school. Even my gas bill is beautiful! I photograph 'Stop' signs, 'Don't Walk on the Grass' signs, headstones and it is all I can do not to get down on my hands and knees and take rubbings of manhole covers. My appreciation of Japanese typography is becoming somewhat maniacal, even to me mainly because my 'Less is More' method of design and typography is more or less out the window. But this has shaken me in a positive way. In retrospect, all my work to date has a pattern. A personal style if you will, influenced by my studies of architects, painters, designers and typographers. The formula to which I have been loyal is Gill Sans, Sans